Environmentalist activists and wealthy donors have been quietly meeting behind the scenes to further the narrative that ExxonMobil “is a corrupt institution” as part of a massive campaign to “delegitimize” the oil giant, according to leaked documents.
Activists say they want to expose the entire fossil fuel industry as part of a massive plot to cover-up global warming, but a leaked email of a “draft” meeting schedule from January shows a single-minded campaign to make Exxon public enemy number one.
Environmentalists’ closed-door meeting show they want to “establish in the public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution” and to “delegitimize them as a political actor” and “drive Exxon & climate into center of 2016 election,” according to the leaked draft agenda obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.
The meeting agenda also talked about “the main avenues for legal actions & related campaigns,” to attack Exxon, according to the Free Beacon, including state and federal prosecution.
“Which of these has the best prospects for successful action? For getting discovery? For creating scandal?” the memo reads.
Kenny Bruno, one of the activists on the leaked email chain who has been in the business of attacking Exxon for years, probably laid out the group’s intentions best when he recently tweeted:
I don’t want to abolish Exxon. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
— Kenny Bruno (@greenwashbuster) March 30, 2016
Indeed, the January meeting of environmentalists was called “Exxon: Revelations & Opportunities” and included a session on the “Goals of an Exxon campaign.”
The meeting was held in Manhattan at the headquarters of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) — one of the wealthy foundations that funded left-wing reporters to investigate Exxon. RFF’s funding has resulted in a series of articles claiming Exxon was misleading the public on global warming.
Attorneys general have used the reporting as a basis for investigations into Exxon’s activities and how they represented the risks of global warming to their shareholders. Democratic lawmakers have used the reporting to call for the Department of Justice to prosecute the oil company under an anti-mafia law.
The Wall Street Journal first broke the news of the environmentalists’ meeting Wednesday in an article about Exxon taking legal action to block a subpoena issued by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Claude Walker, the Virgin Islands AG, also subpoenaed records going back 20 years from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that’s opposed overreaching environmental regulations and employs policy experts skeptical of claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.
“CEI has long been public enemy number one to the global warming alarmist industry, which knows that it can’t win an open public debate on the merits of their anti-energy, anti-people agenda,” Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at CEI, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The subpoena we received today is just the latest round in a campaign of harassment and intimidation begun in 2006 designed to win the debate by silencing and destroying CEI and other non-profit groups that rely on sound science to speak truth to power,” he continued. “They will continue to threaten us, but we will not give up defending freedom and prosperity.”
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